Facebook Launches Organ Donation Tool
Source: nytimes.com
Nearly 7,000 people in the United States die each year while waiting for an organ transplant. It is a number that Facebook hopes to lower with its vast network of 161 million members in this country.
The company announced a plan on Tuesday morning to encourage everyone on Facebook to start advertising their donor status on their pages, along with their birth dates and schools — a move that it hopes will create peer pressure to nudge more people to add their names to the rolls of registered organ donors.
It is a rare foray by Facebook into social engineering from social networking, and one with a potentially profound effect, according to experts in the field of organ donation.
They say people declaring on Facebook that they are organ donors could spur others to sign up at motor vehicle departments or online registries. But these experts say Facebook could create an informal alternative to such registries that could, even though it carries less legal weight, lead to more organ donations.
That is because a disclosure on Facebook could provide the evidence of consent that family members need when deciding whether to donate the organs of a loved one, said Dr. Andrew M. Cameron, the surgical director of liver transplantation at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
“This is going to be an historic day in transplant,” said Dr. Cameron, adding that people who die for want of an organ do so mostly because there are not enough organ donors, not because of any shortcomings in medical technology. “The math will radically change, and we may well eliminate the problem.”
Dr. Cameron estimated that millions of people could shift their donation status overnight.
Previous efforts to encourage organ donation have struggled, Dr. Cameron said, because the issue is sensitive and personal and because the decision is made at the motor vehicle department, where many people may not want to focus on the prospect of dying. Fewer than half of adult Americans have signed up to be an organ donor.
“We have attempted to have a sensitive conversation, one that addresses your mortality, at the D.M.V.,” Dr. Cameron said. “Now we move the conversation into your own home or office with 120 of your closest friends on Facebook.”
Under the Facebook plan, members will be able to declare and update their organ donation status. The status will appear with other biographical information in a section called Health and Wellness, which includes, for example, updates on whether a person has recently lost weight or ever broken a bone.
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Read the full article at: nytimes.com
Photos: Source - Guardian.co.uk, Edited: EL RIC 2012
Facebook: Social Networking or Social Engineering?
By Mirza Yawar Baig | Albalagh.net
The big question is, ‘What is social networking and how is it useful?’
Of course you will hear the usual bleating saying, ‘It is so nice to know what my sister is doing….blah, blah.’
So ask this person, ‘Why can’t you send your sister an email asking what she is doing and she can respond to you. Or even better, if you can, call your sister and talk to her.’ But no, I must talk to my sister in a space where it is not only the sister who is listening but almost anyone who cares to listen, even if that person is a total stranger. So is it about your concern for your sister or is it something else?
So also in this space are pictures which really have no place outside the home – like the pictures showing you hugging your sister or wife or whoever! And so on and so on. I don’t think I need to describe all that there is to people who put it there in the first place.
Yes, of course there are controls. Tell me all about them. Tell me also how come almost nobody uses them. How many Facebook profiles do you know who have the maximum control activated where only their immediate family can see them? And of course in the end, all control is only as good as the techies and geeks on the Facebook site allow. After all they can access all that information anyway.
So what is really being achieved by Facebook, Twitter and so on? (Twitter?? Whoever coined that term was clever. Talk about under the belt. Who twitters? A twit!! – but then I suppose a twit doesn’t know that he is a twit, right?)
So what is achieved?
What is achieved is what would be the equivalent of peeping in through your window. Wanting to know what you are doing all the time. I want to know what you are doing all the time and I want you to know what I am doing all the time.
Intrusion into privacy when it is done against your will is unpleasant. So what is better? Get you into a state of mind where you will volunteer to tell people all about your internal organs on your own. See the change? An intruder is an intruder only when he intrudes against your will. If you invite him in, then he is a guest, not an intruder. Same person, same you but different rules. And that’s what it is all about, the rules of engagement.
So is it ‘social networking’ or is it ‘social engineering?’
The purpose is to change the rules of the society. Break barriers. Destroy the boundaries that protect us.
And where does this lead to? Addiction and intoxication. Addiction to seeing what others are doing and telling others what you are doing on a daily, hourly, minute by minute basis. And being intoxicated with the false feeling that you are so interesting that people are really interested in what you are doing. Not realizing or willing to believe that these are the actions of other intoxicated people.
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Social networking is social engineering. Its purpose is to change the values and ethics of people. This is done, in its most benign form, to encourage you to indulge more and more in the consumerist society that is all consuming. We think we are the consumers. But we are in reality the consumed. Just think, how many of you buy things, see shows, go to restaurants (and other places), like or dislike things because of campaigns on Facebook and Twitter? See what is happening? Your minds are invaded, your thoughts are influenced, and consequently your actions are manipulated and you may not even realize it.
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Read the full article at: albalagh.net
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